Currently, the scenery is remarkable for a phone, considering the amount of 3D buildings as well.
However, the water seems a bit bland.
Instead of relying on satellite imagery for water textures,
Can the devs use satellite imagery to see where water is, and slap on stock water footage? Since it's just a texture, I don't suppose it will straining the performance.
For example,
I have photoshopped this water texture on the above screenshot
The issues is not the water itself. It's the coast lines and how to store all that data efficiently.
The issues is not the water itself. It's the coast lines and how to store all that data efficiently.
What if only the large areas of water bodies (Seas, Oceans, etc) have textures? And the texture slowly fades away till the coast lines, or whenever it joins a river?
This way the AI or the devs won't need to retexture every coast, because the texture ends before reaching any complex landforms.
What if only the large areas of water bodies (Seas, Oceans, etc) have textures? And the texture slowly fades away till the coast lines, or whenever it joins a river?
This way the AI or the devs won't need to retexture every coast, because the texture ends before reaching any complex landforms.
Take a look to my work.
Captain AE Can the devs use satellite imagery to see where water is, and slap on stock water footage?
Having spent many hours editing satellite water/sea its not an easy task. However I was very intrigued by the water effects provided in GeoFS at the throw of a switch, not perfect but not bad either.
Water effects OFF
Water effects ON
P.C. Aerofly FS Aare river.
What about a low resolution outer coast line for easier storage and strongly gradient blur the transition from existing shore line texture to a new more realistic directional deep water texture? It could also be patchy to simulate broken cloud between the sun and the water reflection location, that could save more storage. It need not take into account the selected sim cloud cover as the lighting actions would take place many miles away. A sort of autogen could define the patches of reflective deep water.
Lakes and reservoirs being quite small could have more detailed textured water without a big storage penalty. The largest rivers could have intermittent occasional texture as if under broken cloud. The river Aare west of Zurich in P.C. FS has a stretch of that.
Apologies to Captain AE, I didn’t read all the thread, I am saying the same as you, perhaps I had a false ‘original thought’
P.C. Aerofly FS Aare river.
What about a low resolution outer coast line for easier storage and strongly gradient blur the transition from existing shore line texture to a new more realistic directional deep water texture? It could also be patchy to simulate broken cloud between the sun and the water reflection location, that could save more storage. It need not take into account the selected sim cloud cover as the lighting actions would take place many miles away. A sort of autogen could define the patches of reflective deep water.
Lakes and reservoirs being quite small could have more detailed textured water without a big storage penalty. The largest rivers could have intermittent occasional texture as if under broken cloud. The river Aare west of Zurich in P.C. FS has a stretch of that.
I can’t be the only one that actually prefers the satellite water.
Believe it or not in Aerofly FS 1 all water areas were hand selected. Meaning each outline of a water area was manually created. We obviously cannot do that for the entire world. And good coast outline data is hard to come by. Most data is not precise enough and the data that is is only available for small areas or really expensive.
And now that more glaciers have melted and new aerial images are used we can't even fully reuse the old manual outlines from Aerofly FS 1 I believe.
Perhaps we need to train an AI algorithm for this sort of thing or we need to accept that small bodies of water won't be represented accurately and we would have to fade into large bodies of water to make sure the water outline does not overlap with the coastline or lake/river outline which wouldn't look as good. Even our competitors need to do this fading trick which doesn't look as good as one would hope.
So as I said earlier it's not the water itself that is the issue it's the outlines and masking.
